Authors

Galina Subbotina¹;  ¹ University of Poitiers, France

Discussion

The history of the concept of childhood as a distinct period in the development of the personality has been already well studied in contemporary critical literature focused on the first half of the 19th century in Russia (Kosheleva, 2000), while the perceptions of adolescence has so far hardly attracted the attention of researchers. Today, adolescence is perceived as a period of crisis, rupture, one of the most conflicted and simultaneously important stages in an individual's life history, a period in which some of the fundamental characteristics of the modern personality develop, such as reflective consciousness and the understanding of one's individuality (Foucault, 1984). We propose to study Russian autobiographical texts from the first half of the 19th century in order to understand how the idea of the transition from childhood to youth or adulthood is formed, what are the features of this concept in the Russian context, and how it relates to other elements of modern social transformation, which began at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries and have some peculiarities in Russian culture: autobiographical and self-reflective practices predefined by the Orthodox Church penitence tradition (Kharkhordin, 1999; Subbotina, 2017), the modern love and friendship (Engel, 2004; Ginzburg, 1977), the modern family with new relationships between spouses and between parents and children (Glagoleva, 2000), new gender role distributions (Pushkareva, 1997; Marreze, 2009), etc.